Sunday, February 21, 2010

There are a lot of survey tools out there and the Internet has made conducting and getting survey results easier than ever. Market research aimed at specific markets or demographics, however, aren’t as easy. This valuable information usually requires a lot of know-how and money to get.

Not anymore. AskYourTargetMarket.com has publicly launched after having been in private beta since appearing at the TechCrunch50 in 2009. This tool allows you to quickly and easily build surveys and narrow a target market of focused responders.

The entire app narrows down to a fairly straight-forward dashboard from which you can build your survey and desired demographics/market. You start with a page of simple selections to be made, using sliders and drop-down boxes. Age and income ranges are on sliders, for instance, while race, education, and so forth are drop-downs.

You then use a slider to choose the number of responses you’d like (starting at 50 and going up to 400). Then you’re ready to write your survey.

AskYourTargetMarket can do both straight surveys (a list of questions that everyone is asked) or a Branched Logic survey, for which different answers move to different questions. This allows for some real depth to your survey.

Finally, you can choose to have your survey DoubleCheckd. With this, AskYourTargetMarket will wait for three or more hours after your survey has been given to the panelists and then give it to them again (they won’t know it’s coming a second time). Only those surveys which have like answers on both sessions will be considered valid. This can increase accuracy in many scenarios.

Overall, the AskYourTargetMarket tool is extremely useful for most businesses. The results can be valuable and the price tag at $29.95, to start, is definitely affordable.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Since Thanksgiving night, it has been a part of sports casts and news casts, worldwide.

Even if you aren't a sports or golf fan, you've heard of Tiger Woods and know who he is: a global icon.

We decided to do a survey, split by men and women, and see how the respondents from our consumer panel feel about his press conference on Friday February 19. Their demographics are aged 21-65, all incomes levels, education, professions and races.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Don’t give people a list of prices to choose from when trying to test what the market will bear. It’s only natural for consumers to choose the lowest price!

It’s their job to find the best products and services at the lowest cost.

Instead, you can research how much they currently pay for similar things.

Also consider ways to research the price “difference” between one product or service and another. Think of this example –you could ask if consumers would pay $5 for a latte that has antioxidants. But if the normal latte is $4.50 you could ask – would consumers pay an EXTRA 50cents to add antioxidants to the latte they were already planning on purchasing.

Pricing research is different than testing the reaction of a product or service that has the price disclosed. Many companies say they want to conduct pricing research when they really just want to know if consumers will actually BUY their product or service at a price that still leaves a little room for overhead and profit. If you don’t expect your product or service to be priced differently than similar offerings you might want to focus more on testing features and key messages than on asking consumers what they would be willing to pay. Asking about price before you understand consumers level of interest can be misleading. A consumer who has little or no need for something will torpedo even your lowest price survey option, not because of the price but because they aren’t the ideal target consumer for your offer. Understanding consumers reactions to unique features or functions will help you develop messages that appeal to the kind of customers who will be willing to pay a reasonable price for your product or service.